OpenOffice 2.0 is released

Although this comes a day late, for those of you who use this suite the increasingly-popular OpenOffice.org 2.0 suite is now final and available for download. After many delays and a few setbacks that made the release date be pushed back, a lot of people were worried that we may not see 2.0 before the end of the year. It's out, though, and it is quite spiffy. If you have tried any of the 1.9 Betas you have already seen the vastly improved UI over OpenOffice 1.1, and seen many of the new features it supports. 2.0 has a much more polished look to it, and uses the ODT format by default for files. It can easily edit Word 2000/2002/2003 documents and has a lot of features that already existed in Microsoft Office that users of OO wanted, such as multi-pane previews and support/integration of autoshapes. It now also has proper theming support, for both Windows and Linux.

See a preview here or just try it for yourself. OO has taken some flak for lagging in the features department while MS Office continues to expand integration, but hopefully OO 3 will be seen much sooner than how long we waited for 2.